


Regret To Inform

by MercuryGray



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-01
Updated: 2016-03-01
Packaged: 2018-05-24 02:37:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6138457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/pseuds/MercuryGray
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Doctor Foster receives some unwelcome news.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Regret To Inform

**Author's Note:**

  * For [emmadelosnardos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/emmadelosnardos/gifts).



> (Slightly AU, in that Eliza has left and Jed has merely bottled himself up instead of totally lost himself in morphine, and Mary doesn’t know about that habit yet.)

It was nothing strange or out of the ordinary at first -- just one of the orderlies, standing at the door of the surgery.

 

“Doctor Foster?”

 

The man looked up from the excision he was currently performing and fixed the orderly with a stare that might have melted metal. “Can’t you see I’m a little busy at the moment, private?”

 

Mary felt rather sorry for the poor man -- the assignment to see who would interrupt Doctor Foster in surgery could not have been a coveted one. (She suspected straws had been drawn - she knew it had happened among the nurses at least once.) The orderly looked taken aback, but to his credit, he did not move from the doorway. “There’s a…a...” He seemed to have lost the word.

 

“Well man, spit it out!” Foster snapped, glancing up again for the merest of moments and returning to his work with a vengeance. “I will not lose a patient because of your tied tongue!”

 

“There’s a telegram for you, sir,” The orderly said finally, forcing the words out in rapid fire, holding up the slip in its yellow envelope. Jed looked murderously from the orderly to the incision in the arm in front of him and back to the orderly, and finally, seeing the man would not be moved, gave an audible growl, and  tossed his scapel down on the tray with an audible clang, and grabbed for the towel from the washbasin so he could dry the worst of the blood from his hands before practically ripping the envelope from the man’s hands. “I’m finished,” he announced over his shoulder, fumbling with the flap of the envelope. “Nurse Phinney can close.”

 

Mary looked after him in amazement; Foster was notoriously fastidious with his surgeries to the point of near madness -- to casually toss her the opportunity to suture the wound closed meant that his peace was well and truly disturbed. Or perhaps the interruption had truly been as invasive as he made it seem?

 

He had been...troubled, these past few weeks; if memory served, ever since he had taken his commission and his wife had left. Sudden changes of mood, irritability (well, more than usual) long hours locked away in his room. Mary did not think he was eating, either -- he seemed...more drawn, stretched, as it were, ill at ease with everyone and everything. True, he had not been the model of social grace and concern before, but the departure of Eliza Foster for California had not improved his mood at all.

 

She finished stitching up the wound in the patient’s arm with infinite care, just as Foster (or, to be perfectly fair, Diggs) had shown her how, tying the knots with a patient hand and setting aside her instruments to wash while the orderlies picked the patient up and carried him back to the ward to come out of his chloroformed stupor. There was another patient yet to see this afternoon, but…someone rather important was missing.

 

Mary rinsed her hands and stepped out into the corridor. “Has anyone seen Doctor Foster?” she asked, looking around for some sign of the gentleman.

 

“He went upstairs, Nurse. Took his telegram and went to his room,” someone replied. 

 

To his room? That was unlike him. He had known there were more surgeries scheduled, patients he himself had been superintending.  His room? In the middle of the day?

 

Mary climbed the stairs, stopping at his door and knocking, lightly, three times upon it. “Doctor Foster?” No answer. “Doctor Foster?” 

 

Was he perhaps injured? Mary decided against propriety and turned the handle, letting herself inside.

 

“Doctor --” But she found him soon enough -- slouched against the wall like a dog who has just been kicked, as if he were waiting for another blow to fall from an unseen hand. The telegram, crumpled by an overeager touch, lay on the floor next to him. Mary glanced at it, afraid of what she would find there, afraid of what Foster -- cautious, private, guarded Foster --  would do if she moved to read it. She knelt down next to him, picked it up. He made no move to stop her - a bad sign already. The sound of uncrumpling paper was loud and unwelcome.

  
  


DOCTOR JEDIDIAH FOSTER MANSION HOUSE HOSPITAL ALEXANDRIA VIRGINIA

 

Sir REGRET TO INFORM ELIZABETH FOSTER DIED JUNE 5TH INSTANT MALARIA DEEPEST REGRETS PLEASE SEND INSTRUCTIONS FOR DISPOSITION OF REMAINS 

 

DOCTOR GABRIEL WORTHING SAINT MARY’S HOSPITAL SAN FRANCISCO 

 

“Oh, Jed.” The words were out of her mouth before she could even think about saying them, or pause to reflect on how utterly inappropriate it was that she should call a man by his first name. 

 

But no sooner had she said that then the stunned silence broke, and he began to weep, huge, ragged sobs that seemed to Mary the most miserable sound a human mouth or human heart had ever produced.

 

And before she could think further on it her arms were instinctively around his shoulders, and his face was pillowed on her breastbone, and her hands were in his hair, and they were locked together like a kind of pieta, her cheek against the crown of his head, her own face wet with unasked-for tears. Madonna and Grieving Husband.

 

His arms wrapped limply around her waist, clinging for the simple consolation of remembering what a human touch felt like. Mary knew this because she remembered what it had been like, to suddenly feel as if the whole world had dropped away from you. When she realized that Gustav was no longer there, she had turned away from his room and thought that she could bear it, but made it no further than the hallway before collapsing against the wall and letting her sorrow spill out like a flood. 

 

Yes, she had not had another person on whom to cry- she had been alone, in their house in Boston, alone but for the body that lay in that upstairs room, waiting to be prepared. 

 

She would not have another person suffer so again.

 

She did not really know what sort of relationship Foster had had with his wife, having only met the woman once, and that only in passing. She had formed an image of a calm, professional woman, capable enough of bearing Jed’s mercurial moods and fancies, but little else. Obviously there had  _ been _ something else -- for calm professionalism did not make men cry as Jed was crying now.

 

There was no world to her outside this room, and no creature stirring in it except the one held tight in her embrace. Let Hastings insinuate and Hale bluster, Summers fume and the rest of the hospital go to the devil. Let heaven and hell try to move her --  her place was here, until he had cried himself out.

 

(Much later, in the half-lit calm of her room before the day had started, he would tell her that she had kissed his head and petted his hair, but she did not remember such things. Only the feeling of his face against her collarbones, the slow trickle of tears into the canvas of her corset, the gasping breaths between sobs and the heaving of his shoulders as he did so, and the solemn, serious weight of his arms around her waist, the growing heaviness of his body against hers.) 

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a prompt from emmadelosnardos - Eliza Foster dies in the journey out west. The news reaches Dr. Foster via telegram/messenger while Mary and he are treating the same patient. No established relationship up to that point.
> 
> So, this was interesting to write. I wanted some of the physical intensity of the morphine scene, but needed it not to have the overt sexual tone that Foster's overture in that scene carries. Intimate, but not in a sexual way. (Until the very, very end, at least.) 
> 
> And I wanted Mary to give Jed a hug. Because she wants to, in several scenes -- she clearly looks uncomfortable keeping her distance, wanting so much to embrace him and knowing that it's wrong for her to do so. So here is this absolute catharsis of a hug. And nobody is going to make her ashamed of it.


End file.
